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The mother, poor sad-visaged martyr of deceit, would only draw her thin wrinkled collapsed lips the closer, holding hard hidden the fact that the girl's father had been looked upon by these relatives "of good quality" as a monster of ingratitude, and at the same time as a candidate for a strait waist-coat, whose apostasy and voluntary exile had hastened the good bishop's old age and broken his heart; that the children of the ingrate would be avoided by this conventional clique, like the leprosy, and esteemed sure to develop sooner or later terrible and infinitely inconvenient heresies, and occasion heaven only knew what bouleversement in any comely and orthodox and reasonable method of life.
Not many years since a sad-visaged, middle-aged man might be seen in the streets of one of our seaboard towns at times suddenly arrested in the midst of a brisk walk and fixed motionless for some minutes in the busy thoroughfare. No effort could induce him to stir until, in his opinion, the spell was removed and his invisible tormentor suffered him to proceed.
De Peyster that Time stood still and taunted her, each day exactly like the day before, a day of half starvation, of tiptoed, breathless routine, days in which she spoke not a word save a whisper or two at midnight at the food-bearing visit of the sad-visaged Matilda, three dull, diabolic days dragged by their interminable length of hours. Such days! such awful, awful days!
In those days his Reverence was a youngish man, ruddy, and of a cheerful countenance, a substantial load for his sturdy nag, and altogether, in his glossy black cloth, a figure very different from their gaunt, sad-visaged, shaggily-garbed old guest.
And as she renewed her fondling embraces, the tiny, sad-visaged creature uttered a low, crooning sound of baby satisfaction in response to her endearments a sound more sweet to her ears than the most exquisite music, and which brought a smile to her mouth and a pathos to her dark eyes, rendering her face for the moment almost beautiful.
In vain we endeavor to throw a sunny and joyous air over our picture of this period; nothing passes before our fancy but a crowd of sad-visaged people, moving duskily through a dull gray atmosphere.
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